July 4, 2025 • 25 mins
Holly discusses the inscription on the Beachamps' headstone and the court of public opinion. Tracy shares information about Wilfred Owen's brother Harold.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Fry and
I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
So there was a thing this week. We talked about
the Beecham Sharp Tragedy, sometimes also called the Kentucky Tragedy,
and there was a thing I thought about including in it,
but I did not, okay, And the reason why is
that it's long. Okay, hold on, I'm counting one, two, three, four, five, six,
(00:37):
seven eight. I don't even know it's there. At the
end of their lives and wrote a poem about their
whole experience, with the intent that it would be engraved
on their tombstone, which sounds lovely at least, you know,
(00:59):
in ter of like from a sentimental point of view.
But this poem is long. It's not it's not like
a short little thing. It's like thirty or forty lines long.
It's really really long. And I just and it did
end up on their tombstone, and I just think of
the poor person that had to engrave all of that,
because it is not a brief piece of writing by
(01:21):
any means. It would be like going, you know, I
would like two of Shakespeare's sonnets engraved on my tombstone.
Like today, that would probably be quicker work. We have
machines to do it, mm hmm. Not in eighteen twenty six,
and it basically is a very romanticized version, of course
of their story. I also didn't note that a lot
of people, I mean, I think it's it's pretty commonly
(01:44):
believed that Anne really co authored that final document with
her husband, that she had a lot of say in it.
It was not written in his handwriting. Okay though that
Initially when I read that, I was like, are they
suggesting that this was a fake document? No, most people
are actually indicating that Anne probably wrote it all down
(02:06):
and was a collaborator on it. Whether that's just because
he had poor penmanship or she was kind of driving
the bus in terms of like how that document was
written and what it contained is a matter of some speculation,
But the two of them really wrote it together, right.
This is such a mess of people lately, We've had
(02:30):
a lot of discussions of people accusing each other of
things that cannot be verified. Yeah, the whole thing about
her child is so messy, so messy, and the only
person who we can say knows for sure or knew
for sure who the father was was her, and she
(02:53):
never she never stated it was anyone other than but
there are even some questions about whether she ever actually
stated it was sharp. So it all stays a mystery.
It's a little unsatisfying. Yeah, It's also an interesting thing
(03:15):
in that obviously this was written or this whole thing
took place in the eighteen twenties, so some decades before
the Civil War, and reading some of the accounts, even
though I know this was the case, it's still a
little startling how casually people will just talk about the
(03:36):
enslaved people that they own and how that makes them important.
It's like, we know that that was going on, But
then when I read contemporary accounts, it always feels like
a punch in the gut, like, oh, nobody was Like
I mean people were, but nobody in this you know
who was writing this down and being yes, he was
(03:57):
very wealthy, he had X number of enslaved people, although
they of course don't word it quite that way. Those
people never go own owning people. That seems that seems
weird and wrong, Like I just I don't know, I know,
that's my hippie dippy talking I just want everybody to
(04:17):
have a moral compass. I don't know why that's so hard.
It's also an interesting thing in terms of how completely
gripped and entire community can be by the events and
behaviors in the lives of a very few people, right
(04:38):
because there was all of this infighting among legislators while
farmers were seriously like are we going to survive? And
some of those legislators really did seem more interested in
just winning over one another than the actual constituents that
they represented. We've never seen that before. But when you
(05:01):
think about there are a bunch of people literally sitting there,
going is my farm going to be foreclosed? Am I
going to lose everything? While all of these men bicker,
it's very frustrating. And then it becomes really really easy
to see how there could have been political machinations involved
in the murder that played out Like Beecham obviously, you know,
(05:25):
towards the end was like, yes, I did it, but uh,
and I wanted to do it, but also I don't
know if I would have done it. I waited four years,
but then this guy kept telling me I should do it,
kept pointing out that my wife's reputation had been ruined.
He was right. I did want to kill him after that. Like,
it's a very interesting example of how levers can be
(05:49):
pulled by people with intents that are dishonorable to manipulate
the passions of other people to do things that are
not necessarily on their backs but that will benefit them directly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yeah, And like, one of the things that really struck
me was how much leading up to him, like authoring
or co authoring a confession, how much of it was
based on absolutely circumstantial.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
The closest thing to.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Like actual evidence being his wife's saying, like I recognize
that voice, mm hmm, which I don't know maybe, but
everything else absolutely circumstantial.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Yeah, everybody that gave testimony just about someone else came
along and said, that's not true. He never had that conversation.
I don't know what they're talking about. That didn't happen.
That's not what really took place. It's such a mess,
I don't know. It also is a good, not a
good example, but a clear example of the way that
(06:56):
public opinion gets put in place, because again, right up
until the sentencing, Beecham was very adamant that he didn't
do it, and with no evidence. It took that jury
less than an hour to go yep, guilty. It's like,
did you just go off vibes Like, That's not how
that's supposed to work. It's just a fascinator in a
(07:19):
sad way. I don't have a funny story to add
to this one. This weekly it was really heavy. I
try to make sure there's some ding dong story I
could tell about my own ridiculousness. I'll at least take
the edge off. And there I've certainly, I'm sure done
plenty of ding dong things in the last several days, even,
but I don't have one ready to roll. I don't
(07:42):
think i'd ever heard of this before. Yeah, I mean
I it's one that I stumbled across. It's another one
of those great I was looking at a paper and
I saw a headline on another part of the paper,
and I was like, what's that about? And it was like, oh,
this was one of the great things. Just kind of
makes it light. You surely saw the corpse bride, right, Yeah,
(08:04):
you know where there's that moment. It's in a song
where one of the characters is talking about all of
the things that have been playing out again, revealing some
some things that the characters in the movie have done,
and they go and a murder most Fowl. I found
that exact line as a headline talking about this case
(08:27):
murder exclamation poem most foul, and I always thought that
was very fun and cute and probably based on some
you know, that is, I think, right, I think one
of the Shakespeare tragedies. I'm pretty sure, yes, But I
was surprised to find it as a headline in the
Kentucky newspaper, Murder most Fowl, and it at least gave
(08:49):
me a moment of corpse bride fund in the midst
of a lot of yucky he said, he said, she
maybe said, but we don't know stuff. Yeah. I feel
like the fact that Anne Cook moved out to the
country to be alone with her mother, out of society
(09:11):
was probably a good indicator that she didn't want to
talk about any of that right now. Whether or not
that was an issue of feeling ashamed or I don't know,
maybe she just didn't want to get in the mess. Anyway,
It's a lot of sad and so much hangs on
the testimony of the neighbor, some of which seems to
(09:34):
be almost contradictory of itself. It's unclear anyway, a murder,
most foul. Let's go watch stop motion animation for fun
after such sad stories.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, we talked about Wilfred Owen this week.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
We sure did.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
I have kept circling back to Wilfred Owen repeatedly. Deltiet
decoram Est is a poem that we've read, I think
in high school, maybe also in college, in like a
different context and a more humanity's context in college and
in literature class in high school. And I did not
(10:26):
know anything about his life or biography when reading the poem.
The poem was really about like World War One and
the horrors of trench warfare and the use of gas
and things like that. It was not about Wilfrid Owen
as a person, and so I did not realize that
he had been a soldier and that he had been
(10:48):
killed at the age of only twenty five, so close
to the end of the war. And when I learned that,
I kept just circling back to I'm kind of wanting
to do an episode about it, And as I said
in the episode, I just kept kind of wanting to
hug him. I am sad that he had such a
(11:09):
short life because of war. I got the impression that
you had some similar responses as we were wrapping up
the episode I did and his work, I never really
studied him, so looking at this after you had sent
it over to me, there's such a very obvious through
(11:30):
line from his work too. Another recent topic, who is
near to my heart Kurt Vonneguet in the way he
talks about war. Yeah, I'm like, I guarantee he read
his work. I guarantee it. I had not thought about that,
but that makes absolute sense.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Yeah, it's very not romanticized when he talks about it
in any kind of way, even in his off hand
to sides, it's usually all about how stupid the whole
thing is and pointless, and that is the.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Undertone of a number of Wilfrid Owen's poems as well.
Regarding the height requirement to join the British Army, so
as we said, he was a little more than five
to five, just like a smidge over five to five,
and the height requirement at the very beginning of the
(12:23):
war had been less than that, and then they had
such a surge of people trying to enlist that they
raised it to just have a way to quickly weed
people out, but then kept having to progressively lower it simultaneously.
There were people underneath what had been the original the
original limit, which I think was five foot three, and
(12:45):
there were men under five foot three who wanted to enlist,
and a lot of them actually who wanted to enlist,
And so special battalions were formed, called Bantam battalions, named
for they think rooster, right, bantam roosters. And a lot
of the people who joined these bantom battalions were like
(13:08):
doc workers, mine workers, people who were shorter than average,
but also like really stocky and really strong. And I
kind of went on a slight detour learning about bantam
battalions and then was like, Tracy, you gotta get your
(13:31):
mind back on your work. So I don't know if
if that might be a topic for some kind of
future episode, or it might be incorporated in a future episode.
In some way, I got the impression that like, these
were generally men who were very used to doing very
hard work, and simultaneously the other battalions of men who
(13:57):
were taller than that could be kind kind of patronizing
toward them. Yeah, And so it seems like there was
a lot of a lot of social expectation and ideas
about masculinity kind of interwoven with all of this.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Well, this also makes sense because you know, bantams are
a smaller fowl. Yeah, and they're not just roosters, like,
there are many fowl that could be characterized as bantam, Like,
there are ducks that would be called bantam, as well
as chickens.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
I think I've most often heard it with rooster. Yeah,
but they are little and sturdy.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah. I also have some thoughts about Harold Owen, Yeah,
who I have not researched at all. I know zero
about his life. But he went to such links to
just black out parts of his brother's letters and in
(14:52):
some cases cut out parts of them with scissors, without
knowing that a person who is reading the elections of
his letters that his brother had edited and published might
think that, you know, these were letters sent from the front.
Maybe they just got damaged in transit like that might
be what illegible meant. No, illegible meant that Harold went
(15:15):
through them and expurgated them.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
He made them illegible.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah, And logically, with it being you know, the early
twentieth century, if what was being cut out was in
some way related to Wilfred Owen having feelings or relationships
with other men that likely would not have been something
(15:44):
he would have been writing openly about. So it seems
like this could have been things that his brother would
have been like able to see that people could like
read into, or like his brother not being particularly guarded
without how he was writing about things right but near
(16:06):
that passage where Owen where Harold Owen and his biography
of his brother described him as having no relationship with
anybody because he thought it might interfere with his intellectual ability.
Harold Owen said this about himself, quote, I deliberately chose
the Roman Catholic religion because of its insistence on celibacy,
and Wilfrid's thinking poetry supplanted religion. And I was just like,
(16:30):
I have thoughts and questions, let me do if we
had a time machine, I would just kind of want
to go meet both of these brothers and talk to
them more. This whole thing also illustrates why I can
find the meme about historians describing lovers as friends to
(16:53):
be frustrating, because this is the kind of things that
his story are dealing with when writing about queer history.
A lot of the time friends and family members who
are very protective of somebody's legacy, who in some cases
have gone through and cut parts of their letters out
with scissors and will not allow historians access to the
(17:18):
actual primary original documents to review them, only selectively give
some stuff or some exp expurgated stuff or whatever. And
it's only later, often after either those family members have died,
or those family members have become more open about you know,
(17:40):
their past family member, or in some cases, you know,
something's been passed down through a family and they come
into the hands of somebody who has different you know,
social and political ideal ideals and beliefs than the person
who was originally cutting stuff out of letters with scissors.
That is when historians are actually able to get more
(18:04):
into the real depth of a person's whole life. So
as sure, there are you know, previous histories of or
previous biographies of Wilford Owen, including once written by his brother,
that don't touch on that at all, And one element
of that is like just not having access to the
(18:27):
original documents and their entirety to go through. Yeah, I
always try to think about, like what that moment is
where someone decides essentially to rewrite history, and I honestly
(18:52):
am a little conflicted about it for a couple of reasons.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Obviously, like it sucks to not have original documents available
to tell it an accurate story. I also do understand
as frustrating it as it has been for me. Not
just in cases like this where it's queerness being raised,
but you know, with anyone where there's something about them
(19:16):
that someone in their family thought it was best people
not know. But I can also see as incorrect as
this this move was, you know, someone like his brother,
who clearly had his own stuff going on, worrying that
his brother's legacy would be forgotten or tainted in some way,
(19:39):
and wanting to position it in a way that he
would be recognized for his writing and not the other
things about him. Right, I mean, And it's hard because
it's easy for us to go that's shortsighted. But like
at the time, it probably seemed like, well, his work
could be buried forever, or I can do this right
(20:00):
and he can be seen in this other way. Not
the same thing at all, but right, Like Queen Victoria's
daughter trashed a bunch of her writing yeah, and she
died rather than let people see it. And so I
do understand that there's also a tertiary part of it
for me where I also wonder how much grief is
(20:23):
informing it, because if you've I mean, every one of
us will experience a grief if you have not already,
And I'm sorry, and it sucks. But there is a
thing that happens. I have seen it happen to people
where when someone has passed, without even being cognizant that
you are editing the story, people start telling their version
(20:49):
of that person's story, focusing on things that are different
than other things and wanting to almost create this not
always idealized, but a version that is what they remember
and what they were part of. Yeah. Yeah, and wanting
to like pare down anything that doesn't fit that. Yeah. Again,
(21:09):
don't love it, but I do understand the motivation of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Well, And socially, the culture that you and I have
grown up in and lived in in our whole lives,
we eulogize people after they die, when like that's just
sort of a baseline of what's expected. Is like, yeah,
you don't go to somebody's funeral and say a bunch
(21:35):
of things about them that could be taken as really
negative into a typical.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Unless you're a rabbel rouser, unless you're a rabbl rasler.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Like the word eulogy literally has the idea that it's
affirming there in the word yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
So yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
The story of Wilfred Owen and all of his personal
papers reminds me a little bit of and Lister, who
we covered on the show before. Yeah wrote if you
haven't heard that episode, and Lister basically wanted to marry
a woman and figured out a way to make that
work for herself and wrote many, many, many diaries extensively
(22:12):
chronicling her life and also in chronicling all of her relationships.
And when a family member later on, you know, this
is all in the nineteenth century, when all of this
would have been stigmatized and in some ways illegal. Family
member cracked the code that she had written in, realized
(22:33):
what they were about, and kind of went yikes, and
put them back in the vault. And I feel like
we're so fortunate that those things they went back in
the vault instead of being burned, because that is something
that could have happened and has happened with other figures
from history and honestly people, now, I'm sure so Yeah,
(22:55):
I still just want to hug Wilfrid now I love
so desperately that he and his mother worked out a
code together. Yeah, and a couple of different codes, a
couple of different ways to stay in touch. I didn't
know anything about these postcards until learning about the code
that they had worked out together. And the postcards were
(23:16):
just basically a fast way to let your loved ones
know that you were alive.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
It took you know, two seconds to fill the thing
out and then it would just be mailed. And it
had instructions printed on it very clearly that if you
wrote anything on it other than your name, the date,
and the date of the last letter you received from
that person, it would just be discarded. And also, you know,
the things in and of themselves a form of propaganda,
(23:43):
because of all of the statements you could communicate with
somebody were none of them were like yeah, none of
them were like I am in the hospital and will
never recover. Like that was not an option.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
I wonder too, since these were posts cards, if part
of this wasn't an effort at concealment from like enemies,
reading Oh yeah, maybe and trying to triangulate where people were,
what kind of actions were happening, et cetera. I mean it, yes,
(24:16):
it is propaganda. Still, I'm not trying to claim it's not.
But like, if there is a secondary like intelligence and
concealment aspect to it, maybe so maybe so I want
to I can so easily picture a film about the
leadership sitting around in a room going, well, we have
(24:37):
to make it easy for them to communicate with their
people back home. Okay, but then that's going to make
it easy for our enemies to read them, and them
figuring out this complex flow chart of what they could
and could not include.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Having had a job before where I had to write
things that went through multiple levels of approval and revision,
I am imagining the approval process of exactly what went
on this postcard. I'm imagining that we can just write
a whole musical about the whole writing and editing.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Oh, you write the musical. I don't want the singing,
but I would be really.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Bad at that. I was just thinking about about Operation
Min's Meat is just what that made me think of
a show that I've only heard parts of. Anyway, Anyway,
whatever's happening on your weekend. I hope it as good
as possible. If there's somebody in your life that you
want to go hug, I hope they're cool with that
and that you're able to go give them a hug.
(25:34):
We'll be back tomorrow with a Saturday classic and something
brand new on Monday.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Stuff you Missed in History.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Fry and
I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
So there was a thing this week. We talked about
the Beecham Sharp Tragedy, sometimes also called the Kentucky Tragedy,
and there was a thing I thought about including in it,
but I did not, okay, And the reason why is
that it's long. Okay, hold on, I'm counting one, two, three, four, five, six,
(00:37):
seven eight. I don't even know it's there. At the
end of their lives and wrote a poem about their
whole experience, with the intent that it would be engraved
on their tombstone, which sounds lovely at least, you know,
(00:59):
in ter of like from a sentimental point of view.
But this poem is long. It's not it's not like
a short little thing. It's like thirty or forty lines long.
It's really really long. And I just and it did
end up on their tombstone, and I just think of
the poor person that had to engrave all of that,
because it is not a brief piece of writing by
(01:21):
any means. It would be like going, you know, I
would like two of Shakespeare's sonnets engraved on my tombstone.
Like today, that would probably be quicker work. We have
machines to do it, mm hmm. Not in eighteen twenty six,
and it basically is a very romanticized version, of course
of their story. I also didn't note that a lot
of people, I mean, I think it's it's pretty commonly
(01:44):
believed that Anne really co authored that final document with
her husband, that she had a lot of say in it.
It was not written in his handwriting. Okay though that
Initially when I read that, I was like, are they
suggesting that this was a fake document? No, most people
are actually indicating that Anne probably wrote it all down
(02:06):
and was a collaborator on it. Whether that's just because
he had poor penmanship or she was kind of driving
the bus in terms of like how that document was
written and what it contained is a matter of some speculation,
But the two of them really wrote it together, right.
This is such a mess of people lately, We've had
(02:30):
a lot of discussions of people accusing each other of
things that cannot be verified. Yeah, the whole thing about
her child is so messy, so messy, and the only
person who we can say knows for sure or knew
for sure who the father was was her, and she
(02:53):
never she never stated it was anyone other than but
there are even some questions about whether she ever actually
stated it was sharp. So it all stays a mystery.
It's a little unsatisfying. Yeah, It's also an interesting thing
(03:15):
in that obviously this was written or this whole thing
took place in the eighteen twenties, so some decades before
the Civil War, and reading some of the accounts, even
though I know this was the case, it's still a
little startling how casually people will just talk about the
(03:36):
enslaved people that they own and how that makes them important.
It's like, we know that that was going on, But
then when I read contemporary accounts, it always feels like
a punch in the gut, like, oh, nobody was Like
I mean people were, but nobody in this you know
who was writing this down and being yes, he was
(03:57):
very wealthy, he had X number of enslaved people, although
they of course don't word it quite that way. Those
people never go own owning people. That seems that seems
weird and wrong, Like I just I don't know, I know,
that's my hippie dippy talking I just want everybody to
(04:17):
have a moral compass. I don't know why that's so hard.
It's also an interesting thing in terms of how completely
gripped and entire community can be by the events and
behaviors in the lives of a very few people, right
(04:38):
because there was all of this infighting among legislators while
farmers were seriously like are we going to survive? And
some of those legislators really did seem more interested in
just winning over one another than the actual constituents that
they represented. We've never seen that before. But when you
(05:01):
think about there are a bunch of people literally sitting there,
going is my farm going to be foreclosed? Am I
going to lose everything? While all of these men bicker,
it's very frustrating. And then it becomes really really easy
to see how there could have been political machinations involved
in the murder that played out Like Beecham obviously, you know,
(05:25):
towards the end was like, yes, I did it, but uh,
and I wanted to do it, but also I don't
know if I would have done it. I waited four years,
but then this guy kept telling me I should do it,
kept pointing out that my wife's reputation had been ruined.
He was right. I did want to kill him after that. Like,
it's a very interesting example of how levers can be
(05:49):
pulled by people with intents that are dishonorable to manipulate
the passions of other people to do things that are
not necessarily on their backs but that will benefit them directly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yeah, And like, one of the things that really struck
me was how much leading up to him, like authoring
or co authoring a confession, how much of it was
based on absolutely circumstantial.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
The closest thing to.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Like actual evidence being his wife's saying, like I recognize
that voice, mm hmm, which I don't know maybe, but
everything else absolutely circumstantial.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Yeah, everybody that gave testimony just about someone else came
along and said, that's not true. He never had that conversation.
I don't know what they're talking about. That didn't happen.
That's not what really took place. It's such a mess,
I don't know. It also is a good, not a
good example, but a clear example of the way that
(06:56):
public opinion gets put in place, because again, right up
until the sentencing, Beecham was very adamant that he didn't
do it, and with no evidence. It took that jury
less than an hour to go yep, guilty. It's like,
did you just go off vibes Like, That's not how
that's supposed to work. It's just a fascinator in a
(07:19):
sad way. I don't have a funny story to add
to this one. This weekly it was really heavy. I
try to make sure there's some ding dong story I
could tell about my own ridiculousness. I'll at least take
the edge off. And there I've certainly, I'm sure done
plenty of ding dong things in the last several days, even,
but I don't have one ready to roll. I don't
(07:42):
think i'd ever heard of this before. Yeah, I mean
I it's one that I stumbled across. It's another one
of those great I was looking at a paper and
I saw a headline on another part of the paper,
and I was like, what's that about? And it was like, oh,
this was one of the great things. Just kind of
makes it light. You surely saw the corpse bride, right, Yeah,
(08:04):
you know where there's that moment. It's in a song
where one of the characters is talking about all of
the things that have been playing out again, revealing some
some things that the characters in the movie have done,
and they go and a murder most Fowl. I found
that exact line as a headline talking about this case
(08:27):
murder exclamation poem most foul, and I always thought that
was very fun and cute and probably based on some
you know, that is, I think, right, I think one
of the Shakespeare tragedies. I'm pretty sure, yes, But I
was surprised to find it as a headline in the
Kentucky newspaper, Murder most Fowl, and it at least gave
(08:49):
me a moment of corpse bride fund in the midst
of a lot of yucky he said, he said, she
maybe said, but we don't know stuff. Yeah. I feel
like the fact that Anne Cook moved out to the
country to be alone with her mother, out of society
(09:11):
was probably a good indicator that she didn't want to
talk about any of that right now. Whether or not
that was an issue of feeling ashamed or I don't know,
maybe she just didn't want to get in the mess. Anyway,
It's a lot of sad and so much hangs on
the testimony of the neighbor, some of which seems to
(09:34):
be almost contradictory of itself. It's unclear anyway, a murder,
most foul. Let's go watch stop motion animation for fun
after such sad stories.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, we talked about Wilfred Owen this week.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
We sure did.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
I have kept circling back to Wilfred Owen repeatedly. Deltiet
decoram Est is a poem that we've read, I think
in high school, maybe also in college, in like a
different context and a more humanity's context in college and
in literature class in high school. And I did not
(10:26):
know anything about his life or biography when reading the poem.
The poem was really about like World War One and
the horrors of trench warfare and the use of gas
and things like that. It was not about Wilfrid Owen
as a person, and so I did not realize that
he had been a soldier and that he had been
(10:48):
killed at the age of only twenty five, so close
to the end of the war. And when I learned that,
I kept just circling back to I'm kind of wanting
to do an episode about it, And as I said
in the episode, I just kept kind of wanting to
hug him. I am sad that he had such a
(11:09):
short life because of war. I got the impression that
you had some similar responses as we were wrapping up
the episode I did and his work, I never really
studied him, so looking at this after you had sent
it over to me, there's such a very obvious through
(11:30):
line from his work too. Another recent topic, who is
near to my heart Kurt Vonneguet in the way he
talks about war. Yeah, I'm like, I guarantee he read
his work. I guarantee it. I had not thought about that,
but that makes absolute sense.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Yeah, it's very not romanticized when he talks about it
in any kind of way, even in his off hand
to sides, it's usually all about how stupid the whole
thing is and pointless, and that is the.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Undertone of a number of Wilfrid Owen's poems as well.
Regarding the height requirement to join the British Army, so
as we said, he was a little more than five
to five, just like a smidge over five to five,
and the height requirement at the very beginning of the
(12:23):
war had been less than that, and then they had
such a surge of people trying to enlist that they
raised it to just have a way to quickly weed
people out, but then kept having to progressively lower it simultaneously.
There were people underneath what had been the original the
original limit, which I think was five foot three, and
(12:45):
there were men under five foot three who wanted to enlist,
and a lot of them actually who wanted to enlist,
And so special battalions were formed, called Bantam battalions, named
for they think rooster, right, bantam roosters. And a lot
of the people who joined these bantom battalions were like
(13:08):
doc workers, mine workers, people who were shorter than average,
but also like really stocky and really strong. And I
kind of went on a slight detour learning about bantam
battalions and then was like, Tracy, you gotta get your
(13:31):
mind back on your work. So I don't know if
if that might be a topic for some kind of
future episode, or it might be incorporated in a future episode.
In some way, I got the impression that like, these
were generally men who were very used to doing very
hard work, and simultaneously the other battalions of men who
(13:57):
were taller than that could be kind kind of patronizing
toward them. Yeah, And so it seems like there was
a lot of a lot of social expectation and ideas
about masculinity kind of interwoven with all of this.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Well, this also makes sense because you know, bantams are
a smaller fowl. Yeah, and they're not just roosters, like,
there are many fowl that could be characterized as bantam, Like,
there are ducks that would be called bantam, as well
as chickens.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
I think I've most often heard it with rooster. Yeah,
but they are little and sturdy.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Yeah. I also have some thoughts about Harold Owen, Yeah,
who I have not researched at all. I know zero
about his life. But he went to such links to
just black out parts of his brother's letters and in
(14:52):
some cases cut out parts of them with scissors, without
knowing that a person who is reading the elections of
his letters that his brother had edited and published might
think that, you know, these were letters sent from the front.
Maybe they just got damaged in transit like that might
be what illegible meant. No, illegible meant that Harold went
(15:15):
through them and expurgated them.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
He made them illegible.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah, And logically, with it being you know, the early
twentieth century, if what was being cut out was in
some way related to Wilfred Owen having feelings or relationships
with other men that likely would not have been something
(15:44):
he would have been writing openly about. So it seems
like this could have been things that his brother would
have been like able to see that people could like
read into, or like his brother not being particularly guarded
without how he was writing about things right but near
(16:06):
that passage where Owen where Harold Owen and his biography
of his brother described him as having no relationship with
anybody because he thought it might interfere with his intellectual ability.
Harold Owen said this about himself, quote, I deliberately chose
the Roman Catholic religion because of its insistence on celibacy,
and Wilfrid's thinking poetry supplanted religion. And I was just like,
(16:30):
I have thoughts and questions, let me do if we
had a time machine, I would just kind of want
to go meet both of these brothers and talk to
them more. This whole thing also illustrates why I can
find the meme about historians describing lovers as friends to
(16:53):
be frustrating, because this is the kind of things that
his story are dealing with when writing about queer history.
A lot of the time friends and family members who
are very protective of somebody's legacy, who in some cases
have gone through and cut parts of their letters out
with scissors and will not allow historians access to the
(17:18):
actual primary original documents to review them, only selectively give
some stuff or some exp expurgated stuff or whatever. And
it's only later, often after either those family members have died,
or those family members have become more open about you know,
(17:40):
their past family member, or in some cases, you know,
something's been passed down through a family and they come
into the hands of somebody who has different you know,
social and political ideal ideals and beliefs than the person
who was originally cutting stuff out of letters with scissors.
That is when historians are actually able to get more
(18:04):
into the real depth of a person's whole life. So
as sure, there are you know, previous histories of or
previous biographies of Wilford Owen, including once written by his brother,
that don't touch on that at all, And one element
of that is like just not having access to the
(18:27):
original documents and their entirety to go through. Yeah, I
always try to think about, like what that moment is
where someone decides essentially to rewrite history, and I honestly
(18:52):
am a little conflicted about it for a couple of reasons.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Obviously, like it sucks to not have original documents available
to tell it an accurate story. I also do understand
as frustrating it as it has been for me. Not
just in cases like this where it's queerness being raised,
but you know, with anyone where there's something about them
(19:16):
that someone in their family thought it was best people
not know. But I can also see as incorrect as
this this move was, you know, someone like his brother,
who clearly had his own stuff going on, worrying that
his brother's legacy would be forgotten or tainted in some way,
(19:39):
and wanting to position it in a way that he
would be recognized for his writing and not the other
things about him. Right, I mean, And it's hard because
it's easy for us to go that's shortsighted. But like
at the time, it probably seemed like, well, his work
could be buried forever, or I can do this right
(20:00):
and he can be seen in this other way. Not
the same thing at all, but right, Like Queen Victoria's
daughter trashed a bunch of her writing yeah, and she
died rather than let people see it. And so I
do understand that there's also a tertiary part of it
for me where I also wonder how much grief is
(20:23):
informing it, because if you've I mean, every one of
us will experience a grief if you have not already,
And I'm sorry, and it sucks. But there is a
thing that happens. I have seen it happen to people
where when someone has passed, without even being cognizant that
you are editing the story, people start telling their version
(20:49):
of that person's story, focusing on things that are different
than other things and wanting to almost create this not
always idealized, but a version that is what they remember
and what they were part of. Yeah. Yeah, and wanting
to like pare down anything that doesn't fit that. Yeah. Again,
(21:09):
don't love it, but I do understand the motivation of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Well, And socially, the culture that you and I have
grown up in and lived in in our whole lives,
we eulogize people after they die, when like that's just
sort of a baseline of what's expected. Is like, yeah,
you don't go to somebody's funeral and say a bunch
(21:35):
of things about them that could be taken as really
negative into a typical.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Unless you're a rabbel rouser, unless you're a rabbl rasler.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Like the word eulogy literally has the idea that it's
affirming there in the word yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
So yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
The story of Wilfred Owen and all of his personal
papers reminds me a little bit of and Lister, who
we covered on the show before. Yeah wrote if you
haven't heard that episode, and Lister basically wanted to marry
a woman and figured out a way to make that
work for herself and wrote many, many, many diaries extensively
(22:12):
chronicling her life and also in chronicling all of her relationships.
And when a family member later on, you know, this
is all in the nineteenth century, when all of this
would have been stigmatized and in some ways illegal. Family
member cracked the code that she had written in, realized
(22:33):
what they were about, and kind of went yikes, and
put them back in the vault. And I feel like
we're so fortunate that those things they went back in
the vault instead of being burned, because that is something
that could have happened and has happened with other figures
from history and honestly people, now, I'm sure so Yeah,
(22:55):
I still just want to hug Wilfrid now I love
so desperately that he and his mother worked out a
code together. Yeah, and a couple of different codes, a
couple of different ways to stay in touch. I didn't
know anything about these postcards until learning about the code
that they had worked out together. And the postcards were
(23:16):
just basically a fast way to let your loved ones
know that you were alive.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
It took you know, two seconds to fill the thing
out and then it would just be mailed. And it
had instructions printed on it very clearly that if you
wrote anything on it other than your name, the date,
and the date of the last letter you received from
that person, it would just be discarded. And also, you know,
the things in and of themselves a form of propaganda,
(23:43):
because of all of the statements you could communicate with
somebody were none of them were like yeah, none of
them were like I am in the hospital and will
never recover. Like that was not an option.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
I wonder too, since these were posts cards, if part
of this wasn't an effort at concealment from like enemies,
reading Oh yeah, maybe and trying to triangulate where people were,
what kind of actions were happening, et cetera. I mean it, yes,
(24:16):
it is propaganda. Still, I'm not trying to claim it's not.
But like, if there is a secondary like intelligence and
concealment aspect to it, maybe so maybe so I want
to I can so easily picture a film about the
leadership sitting around in a room going, well, we have
(24:37):
to make it easy for them to communicate with their
people back home. Okay, but then that's going to make
it easy for our enemies to read them, and them
figuring out this complex flow chart of what they could
and could not include.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Having had a job before where I had to write
things that went through multiple levels of approval and revision,
I am imagining the approval process of exactly what went
on this postcard. I'm imagining that we can just write
a whole musical about the whole writing and editing.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Oh, you write the musical. I don't want the singing,
but I would be really.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Bad at that. I was just thinking about about Operation
Min's Meat is just what that made me think of
a show that I've only heard parts of. Anyway, Anyway,
whatever's happening on your weekend. I hope it as good
as possible. If there's somebody in your life that you
want to go hug, I hope they're cool with that
and that you're able to go give them a hug.
(25:34):
We'll be back tomorrow with a Saturday classic and something
brand new on Monday.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Stuff you Missed in History.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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